In practice, however, it is very common to approximate this sound with ⟨æ⟩ (officially a near-open (near-low) front unrounded vowel),[citation needed] and to use ⟨a⟩ as an open (low) central unrounded vowel. This is the normal practice, for example, in the historical study of the English language. The loss of separate symbols for open and near-open front vowels is usually considered unproblematic, because the perceptual difference between the two is quite small, and very few languages contrast the two. See open central unrounded vowel for more information. If one needs to specify that the vowel is front, they can use symbols like [a̟] ([a] with "advanced" diactric), or [æ̞] (lowered [æ]), with the latter being more common.

The IPA prefers terms "close" and "open" for vowels, and the name of the article follows this. However, a large number of linguists,[who?] perhaps a majority, prefer the terms "high" and "low".[citation needed]

Its vowel height is open, also known as low, which means the tongue is positioned as far as possible from the roof of the mouth – that is, as low as possible in the mouth.

Its vowel backness is front, which means the tongue is positioned as far forward as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Note that rounded front vowels are often centralized, which means that often they are in fact near-front. This subsumes central open (central low) vowels because the tongue does not have as much flexibility in positioning as it does in the mid and close (high) vowels; the difference between an open front vowel and an open back vowel is similar to the difference between a close front and a close central vowel, or a close central and a close back vowel.

Many languages have some form of an unrounded open vowel. For languages that have only a single low vowel, the symbol for this vowel ⟨a⟩ may be used because it is the only low vowel whose symbol is part of the basic Latin alphabet. Whenever marked as such, the vowel is closer to a central [ä] than to a front [a].